A judge has dismissed an appeal by two hunt employees convicted of breaching hunting laws.
Huntsman Derek Hopkins and terrierman Kevin Allen, of the Harborough-based Fernie Hunt, were found guilty earlier this year of hunting a live fox and digging into an active badger sett.
However, the pair had maintained they were hunting an artificial trail when caught on film by hunt monitors.
They also claimed they had dug into a hole to shoot a fox that had gone to ground, not to release it so it could be hunted.
The pair both maintained they had examined the hole and believed it was not a badger sett in current use.
Yesterday, at the end of a five-day appeal into their convictions, Judge Michael Pert QC confirmed the convictions and accused the Fernie Hunt of using the “cover of trail hunting as a cynical subterfuge.”
Judge Pert said: “It is clear to us that the hunt was hunting a live fox.”
He said he and two magistrates were convinced that the hunt had dug into an active badger sett. He added: “We found Hopkins to be an unconvincing witness. We found Allen to be shifty and evasive.”
However, he praised the objectivity of the four investigators from the League Against Cruel Sports, who filmed the hunt on January 27, 2010.
Please read the full article on this link:
The following article was originally written by the Head Of Campaigns and Communications of the League Against Cruel Sports:
‘It has been an instructive and very interesting week. Colleagues and I have spent the last week holed up in Leicester Crown Court listening to the desperate attempts of two employees of the Fernie Hunt to overturn convictions under the Hunting Act and the Protection of Badgers Act.
The case centred on an incident in January 2010 when League investigators witnessed the Fernie Hunt pursuing and then digging out a live fox. It was so text book, so open and shut, that the fact the defendants didn’t plead guilty was the first surprise. The second was that they appealed after their conviction at magistrates court earlier this year.
Of course, the Fernie weren’t acting entirely on their own gut instinct. They were taking advice from the Countryside Alliance and the Masters of Fox Hounds Association, two organisations so hell bent on avoiding any convictions under the Hunting Act that they will throw – literally – hundreds of thousands of pounds at lawyers to try and get them out of it. Hunts are told that if arrested or called in for question, the first thing they should do is call the Alliance.
Do hunts obey the instruction? Of course they do. One of the most bizarre things about hunting is the rigidly hierarchical structure that hunts impose on all who interact with them. Throughout this case, the witnesses one by one referred to their colleagues by their proper title rather than by their human names. When the whipper in took to the stand, he sounded as though he was about to break down when he spoke of how embarrassed he was when his hounds broke away and the huntsman “had to step in to take control”.
But that’s an aside. The defence team, led by eminent counsel Phillip Mott QC, evidently realised that some of their witnesses at magistrates court were pretty awful, and so tried new witnesses at crown court. The judge was unimpressed, and in the case of the defence’s badger ‘expert’ Peter Caruana, he said that he was “so subjective as to be unsuitable to be an expert witness”. The judge was clear in preferring to hear the expert evidence of Professor Steve Harris of Bristol University and Dr Pam Mynott of The Badger Trust over and above Mr Caruana of Truro who once worked for Defra.
Asked if he thought the earth into which he dug was an active one, terrierman Mr Allen said that it was, then that it wasn’t, then it was, and wasn’t again, all in the space of thirty minutes. Mr Caruana, the defence’s badger ‘expert’, said that the badger sett definitely wasn’t an active one on the day of the hunt, but that it was a week later, but now isn’t again. The case was comedy gold, and the judge clearly recognised this.
When Mr Allen was being cross examined, the judge asked him why on earth a terrierman needs to be present during a trail hunt. Mr Allen floundered. “Because occasionally a landowner will ask us to dispatch a fox”, was about the best he could do. The comedy and inconsistency came thick and fast, and in his judgment, the judge said that the hunt were engaged in “cynical subterfuge”, that Mr Hopkins was “unconvincing” and that Mr Allen was “shifty”.
The outcome of this case is that Messrs Hopkins and Allen have a bill of £10,400 to pay to the crown, not to mention legal costs thought to be more than a hundred thousand pounds. One would hope in the interests of justice that the Hunt won’t do another public appeal for funds, as they did for their ‘appeal fund’.
But perhaps the saddest part of this story relates to Derek Hopkins, the huntsman. He lives in a house owned by the Fernie Hunt. The Hunt will now be obliged to sack Mr Hopkins, meaning that he will lose his home. The tragedy is that his family – who had no part in his crimes – will also pay the price for his illegal bloodsport.’
Watch the hunt video and read the article on this link:http://www.league.org.uk/blogs_entry.aspx?id=662
